Tuesday, March 07, 2017
Interesting interview with Timothy Snyder, a historian with some ideas about how to resist Trump. This part resonated with me, because I believe that as lawyers it falls to us to prevent the normalization of bigotry and totalitarianism:
This is not to say, by any means, that resistance by laypersons is any less valuable-- in most ways I think it is more important. I believe that our glamor profession has a specialized role, just as we do in society generally. The machinery of government is what we depend on, and work with daily, so it falls to us to recognize and repair any malfunctions.Also on the positive side so far are the lawyers. I don’t mean all the lawyers. I don’t mean Kellyanne Conway. I don’t mean Jeff Sessions, both of whom seem to have violated professional ethics pretty drastically. I do mean the lawyers who had got out in front already in November, December, and started to think about what the necessary lawsuits might be and then were ready to file in January and February. The reason I think of the lawyers is that, like Germany in the ’20s and ’30s, we pride ourselves on being a rule-of-law state. You can’t undo a rule-of-law state without lawyers. In the Nazi example, most of the lawyers switched over. In fact, a lot of the lawyers were right at the forefront of some of the most atrocious policies of that regime.
// posted by Bill @ 11:37 AM 
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